Football Is Trumpball Lite Can Kaepernick Save Us? By Robert Lipsyte
The Super Bowl is superfluous this year. Who needs a reality show
about violence, domination, and sexism, not to mention brain damage, now
that we have Trumpball, actual reality that not only authenticates
football’s authoritarianism but transforms us from bystanders into
victims? Before this game is over, the players may swarm the grandstands
and beat the hell out of us.
Pro football actually helped prepare us for the new president’s upset
victory by normalizing a basic tenet of jock culture: anyone not on the
team is an enemy, the Other. And it’s open season on opponents, the
fans of opponents, critics, and women (unless they’re cheerleaders or
moms). Trash talking is the lingua franca of this Trumpian moment,
bullying the default tactic.
Yet pro football has also provided us with the single most vivid
image of current American resistance to racism. Last summer, before a
pre-season game, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat
during the playing of the national anthem as a symbol of his refusal
“to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and
people of color.” As the season progressed, he started going down on his right kneewhenthe anthem began, revealing that he was wearing
black socks decorated with pigs in police hats. These, he said,
represented “rogue cops that are allowed to hold positions in police
departments.” He would eventually stop wearing them, convinced that the
socks were a tactical mistake.
Kaepernick’s non-violent gestures, done initially without fanfare,
were the most powerful message from SportsWorld since that other hard
year of despair and determination, 1968, when two American Olympic
medalists, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their black-gloved fists in Mexico City.Click here to read more of this dispatch.

Friends,
the centerpiece of today’s Gospel is Jesus healing the hemorrhaging
woman. Having a flow of blood for twelve years meant that anyone with
whom she came in contact would be considered unclean. She couldn’t, in
any meaningful sense, participate in the ordinary life of her society.

The
woman touches Jesus—and how radical and dangerous an act this was,
since it should have rendered Jesus unclean. But so great is her faith,
that her touch, instead, renders her clean. Jesus effectively restores
her to full participation in her community.

But
what is perhaps most important is this: Jesus implicitly puts an end to
the ritual code of the book of Leviticus. What he implies is that the
identity of the new Israel, the Church, would not be through ritual
behaviors but through imitation of him. Notice, please, how central this
is in the New Testament. We hear elsewhere in the Gospels that Jesus
declares all foods clean,and throughout the letters of Paul we hear a
steady polemic against the Law. All of this is meant to show that Jesus
is at the center of the new community.

Weapons, Warriors, and Fear as the New Order in America

by William Astore
I came of age during America’s Cold War
with the Soviet Union, witnessing its denouement while serving in the
U.S. military. In those days, the USSR led the world’s weapons trade,
providing arms to the Warsaw Pact (the military alliance it dominated)
as well as to client states like Cuba, Egypt, and Syria. The United
States usually came in second in arms dealing, a dubious silver medal
that could, at least, be rationalized as a justifiable response to
Soviet aggression, part of the necessary price for a longstanding policy
of “containment.” In 1983, President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the
Soviet Union an “evil empire” in part because of its militarism and aggressive push to sell weaponry around the globe, often accompanied by Soviet troops, ostensibly as trainers and advisers.
After the USSR imploded in 1991, dominating the world’s arms trade
somehow came to seem so much less evil. In fact, faced with large trade
deficits, a powerful military-industrial complex looking for markets,
and ever more global military commitments, Washington actively sought to
promote and sell American-made weaponry on a remarkable scale. And in
that it succeeded admirably.
Today, when it comes to building and exporting murderous weaponry, no
other country, not even that evil-empire-substitute, Vladimir Putin’s
Russia, comes faintly close. The U.S. doth bestride the world of arms
production and dealing like a colossus. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, U.S. arms contractors sold $209.7 billion in weaponry in 2015, representing 56% of the world’s production. Of that, $40 billion was exported to an array of countries, representing “half of all agreements in the worldwide arms bazaar,” as the New York Times
put it. France ($15 billion) was a distant second, with Putin’s Russia
($11 billion) earning a weak third. Judged by the sheer amount of
weapons it produces for itself, as well as for others, the U.S., notes Forbes,
is “still comfortably the world’s superpower — or warmonger, depending
on how you look at it.” Indeed, under President Obama, in the five-year
period beginning in 2010, American arms exports outpaced the figures for
the previous Bush-Cheney years by 23%. http://lobelog.com/weapons-warriors-and-fear-as-the-new-order-in-america/#more-37758

Welcome to the Jewish American Dissonance

by Edo Konrad
In early December, just a month after the election of Donald Trump, American alt-right leader Richard Spencer sat down for an interview
with Al Jazeera. Speaking to Kristen Saloomey, Spencer, who brought his
white supremacist views along as he was catapulted into spotlight over
the past year, railed against the “great erasure” of the “white world,”
diversity, and the underrepresentation of American whites in corporate
America, among other things.
Spencer has made a career out of adroitly tapping into the teeming
rage of a white America after eight years of President Obama. He has
successfully suffused public discourse with anti-Muslim, anti-black,
anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic sentiments that at least felt
like they were in check under Obama. For years Spencer has been
promoting a view of the world undergirded by the belief in both white,
European supremacy and its negative: that people of color are not only
inferior, they are dependent on the greatness of the master
race for any success they may have found. And all this under the cloak
of a genteel smile, an affable personality, and a hipster haircut.
The most interesting part of Spencer’s interview, however, focuses on
his ideas regarding immigration. While he unsurprisingly opposes
illegal immigration and supports Trump’s plan to build a wall on the Mexican border, Spencer is actually far more interested in how “legal immigration” shapes the demographic makeup of the United States. http://lobelog.com/welcome-to-the-jewish-american-dissonance/#more-37752

Trump Justifies Executive Orders with Exaggerations Grounded in Bias

by James J. Zogby
By now, Donald Trump’s penchant for exaggeration and self-promotion
has become well-established. Whether born of a form of pathological
narcissism or just plain hucksterism, his need to claim that everything
he does is the biggest and best is unsettling and, at times,
embarrassing.
Most troubling is the concern that Mr. Trump may actually believe his
non-factual boasts –that because his ego is so needy he cannot accept
reality. This is clearly not a comforting quality for a Commander-in-
Chief. http://lobelog.com/trump-justifies-executive-orders-with-exaggerations-grounded-in-bias/#more-37728

Who supplies the news?

Patrick Cockburn on misreporting in Syria and Iraq

The nadir of
Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria has been the
reporting of the siege of East Aleppo, which began in earnest in July
and ended in December, when Syrian government forces took control of the
last rebel-held areas and more than 100,000 civilians were evacuated.
During the bombardment, TV networks and many newspapers appeared to lose
interest in whether any given report was true or false and instead
competed with one another to publicise the most eye-catching atrocity
story even when there was little evidence that it had taken place. NBC
news reported that more than forty civilians had been burned alive by
government troops, vaguely sourcing the story to ‘the Arab media’.
Another widely publicised story – it made headlines everywhere from the Daily Express to the New York Times
– was that twenty women had committed suicide on the same morning to
avoid being raped by the arriving soldiers, the source in this case
being a well-known insurgent, Abdullah Othman, in a one-sentence quote
given to the Daily Beast.

From Neocon to Realist

Why I became a lapsed neoconservative and joined The American Conservative

Editor’s Note: Pratik Chougule has been recruited by TAC, effective February 6, as one of our two executive editors. He comes to us from The National Interest,
where he was managing editor. Knowing of Pratik’s former commitment to
the neoconservative creed, we asked him to share with us, and our
readers, a bit about his intellectual journey from neocon to
foreign-policy realist. This is what he sent.

An
explanation is probably in order. I was, until recently, a
neoconservative—a true-believing one at that. Now I’m about to join TheAmerican Conservative, a magazine founded in defiance of my erstwhile colleagues.

Friends,
today we celebrate the feast of the great St. Thomas Aquinas. As a
young student, Thomas famously asked of his theology teacher, "But
Master, what is God?" The story of this question has always struck me as
plausible, for the question sounds so much like Thomas: clear, simple,
spiritually searching.

Thomas
asked questions because the natural curiosity of his mind was hooked
onto the most fascinating of mysteries. He loved God with his whole
mind. It led him to interrogate with critical respect pagan scientists,
Jewish rabbis, Muslim scholars, and the greatest masters of our own
Christian tradition. Thomas's friend and confessor, Reginald of Piperno,
commented that the saint owed his great wisdom much more to prayer than
to study. He would spend hours late at night resting his head on the
tabernacle, begging for knowledge of the sacred mysteries.

We
all know Thomas's title as the Doctor angelicus, the Angelic Doctor,
but perhaps we should reflect more today on his title Doctor communis,
the Common Doctor. In his relentless love of God with his whole mind, in
his consistent analogical imagination rooted in creation and the
Incarnation, in his Christocentrism—Thomas is the touchstone!

WPR Articles Jan. 20 — Jan. 27

A
study by Oxfam found that inequality is on the rise in India, and that
the richest 1 percent of Indians control 58 percent of the country’s
total wealth. In an email interview, Vamsi Vakulabharanam, an associate
professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, discusses income
inequality in India.

The
Polish opposition’s month-long occupation of parliament may have ended
earlier this month, but the deep political divisions behind Poland’s
latest political crisis remain. Critics fear that Poland could plunge
deeper into authoritarian nationalism or even worse, undermining the EU
at a crucial time.

Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s weeklong tour of Southeast Asia and
Australia earlier this month was an opportunity to stress the importance
of defending international norms and laws, especially in the South
China Sea. The trip was planned in relative haste after Donald Trump’s
election as U.S. president.

Gambia’s
new president, Adama Barrow, finally returned to the country yesterday,
his arrival formally marking the end of a six-week political crisis. Do
ECOWAS’ actions to intervene in Gambia show a growing willingness by
the West African bloc to use force against leaders who overstay their
welcome?

On
New Year’s Eve, a man in southeastern Brazil shot and killed his
ex-wife, their son and 10 other people, before taking his own life. The
incident was the latest example of the rampant violence against women in
Brazil. In an email interview, Sueann Caulfield discusses women’s
rights in Brazil.

Last
year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called women who work “half
persons,” sparking outrage among many liberal Turks, though his
statement resonated with the country’s conservative majority. In an
email interview, Melinda Negrón-Gonzales discusses women’s rights and
gender equality in Turkey.

One
of the more unexpected decisions to emerge in the waning days of Barack
Obama’s presidency was his move last week to ease U.S. sanctions against
Sudan that have been in place for nearly two decades. The move to open
up Sudan’s economy might encourage the reforms that 20 years of
sanctions have not.

Security
has defined France’s Africa policy under President Francois Hollande,
who was in Mali last week for the final Africa-France Summit of his
presidency. But critics argue that Hollande’s militaristic approach
distracted from the institution-building necessary for long-term African
stability.

America’s
adversaries are almost certain to challenge President Donald Trump
early on to test his inexperience in national security affairs. How he
and his team respond will determine whether other adversaries mount
challenges of their own. What is unclear is which of America’s
adversaries will move first.

According
to Human Rights Watch, a new rebel group in the Central African
Republic—known as Return, Reclamation, Rehabilitation—has killed at
least 50 people and displaced over 17,000 in the northwest of the
country since late 2015. In an email interview, Igor Acko discusses the
security situation in CAR.

Brazil’s
president is having a kind of homecoming, but not the one he wanted.
Michel Temer served in the 1980s as the top security official for the
state of Sao Paulo, overseeing its prison system. He is now struggling
to contain an unprecedented nationwide crisis in Brazil’s jails.

What
will international peacemaking look like in the Trump era? Five
tentative but credible predictions paint a bleak picture. Though the
U.S. has been edging back from its global peacemaker role for years,
Donald Trump’s agenda will further damage institutions the U.S. built
after 1945, starting with the U.N.

Since
2008, the world economy has been caught in a vicious cycle that it
can’t seem to break. With Trump’s election and China’s economic
slowdown, global economic interconnectedness continues to unravel. A
trade war now looks more likely than ever, with disastrous implications
for the world economy.

Presidential
transitions are always a time of apprehension and uncertainty for the
career civil servants who keep the big machine of government running.
President Donald Trump’s plans make this particular transition scarier
than most. His performance at the CIA on Saturday, in particular, is an ominous sign.

With
his inauguration address last Friday, President Donald Trump announced
to Americans and the world that the “America First” era had arrived. But
is this iconoclastic challenge to the U.S. foreign policy orthodoxy as
alarming as it seems? How much does global stability still depend on the
United States?

Labor
organizations in China expect worker protests to spike in the coming
weeks, in large part because workers from the “new economy,” which
includes e-commerce, are experiencing problems with overdue payments for
the first time. In an email interview, Cynthia Estlund discusses labor
rights in China.

Public
support for the Israel Defense Forces has not prevented it from
becoming an important locus of Israel’s domestic culture wars. The
contending forces in Israeli society—right, left, religious and
secular—seek to make use of the IDF’s unique role and prestige to
promote their respective agendas.

Most
Middle East observers believe that Donald Trump’s presidency will boost
the Israeli right, dealing a blow to the center and left, and worsening
relations with Palestinians. While that consensus scenario remains
highly probable, a sharply different possible turn of events should not
be discounted.

If
history holds, the U.S. will be drawn into conflict somewhere that was
never mentioned during the 2016 presidential campaign. In strategy,
unexpected threats are the norm, and there is no reason to believe this
will not continue to be the case. Looking ahead, two types of security
challenges stand out.

Earlier
this month, Indonesia’s military chief unilaterally suspended defense
ties with Australia, forcing President Joko Widodo to quickly walk back
the move and raising questions about the amount of power the military
has. In an interview, Fabio Scarpello discusses civil-military relations
in Indonesia.

In
this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein,
and senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the global reactions to
U.S. President Donald Trump’s first week in office. For the Report,
Daniel McDowell talks with Peter Dörrie about the growing problems
facing globalism.

Afghan
authorities blamed a bombing this month in Kandahar that killed five
Emirati diplomats on the Haqqani network, which many suspect of having
ties to Pakistani intelligence. That triggered speculation that the
attack was a message to the UAE about its growing counterterrorism ties
with India.